Ramblings by Jaya Jha in a world that is neither black, nor white!

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An advice to PPTers

After attending “n” number of PPTs, I think I have an advice or two to give to all these pre-placement talkers. First of all, please, please respect the time expectation of your audience. Its not necessary that all people in your team have to speak for half an hour each… Trust me, no!! Also, please have a good speaker(s), with a smart personality to deliver your PPT. The number of drab presentations have been so huge in the 2 years at business schools, that it takes no effort to switch off once another one like those start. Especially if you are one of those companies who want to get higher on the priority of students and currently are not, please make sure that the person delivering the talk presents a smart face (no fake smartness please). Then find how many companies have already given PPTs before you. If you are not amongst the first few, you can safely take the follownig steps

Cut down all the crap about what all you want in the candidates. “Team work, individual motivation, analytical ability, creativity, energy, having drive” etc. etc. Even if you do not want to believe it, all the companies want the same thing. If it is a must for you to tell all this to us a joke of the kind “we want all the things earlier PPTs have shown to you” would suffice. Trust me, no company has ever told us that they want people who are lazy, who are not driven, who are not creative etc. (even if they would actually want people like those!!) If you really have to tell something, tell us what specialization/majors you are looking to hire from, whether work experience and academics play a role and what the selection process in like (if it is different from the usual).

Do not drag on and on about Corporate Social Responsibility. Yes – I know your employee satisfaction surveys and other research with employees and HR consultants have told you that employees seek some inner satisfaction by getting involved in community activities. But then every company tells us in details about their initiatives and we have no way of differentiating one from the other. In PPTs, therefore, it is at best a point of parity and not of differentiation. You can skip it (nobody would not apply to your company because you did not have a slide on CSR). But if put you must because the boss of your boss of your boss wants it, be quick and precise and move on!!

Do not say “all companies say this, but we really do it.” Why? Because all companies have started saying that.

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About Jaya

Jaya Jha is an entrepreneur, a techie, a writer and a poet. She was born and brought up in various towns of Bihar and Jharkhand. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, she realized early on that the corporate world was not her cup of tea. In 2008, she started Pothi.com, one of the ﬁrst print-on-demand publishing platform in India.
She currently lives in Bangalore and divides her time between writing and working on her company's latest product InstaScribe (http://instascribe.com) with a vision to make it the best e-book creation tool.
Blog: https://jayajha.wordpress.com
Twitter: @jayajha
Facebook: http://facebook.com/MovingOnTheBook

Well even if there is any impact, the rate of depreciation seems too high…majority of these recruiters were sitting on our side in top notch b-schools only a few years back.

Or maybe the exposure to the rugged vengeful world teaches you the pleasure of sweet revenge: I suffered, so now you suffer, of course in the bargain the company suffers; an endless “suffering-suffer” cycle.😀

Tadatmya, Ashish, Parag: Sorry for some reason WordPress’ antispam system thought your comments were spams😉 Saw only now ; so they appeared little late.

Parag: IDFC’s PPT was certainly what I liked the most of them all… But no, writing this was not inspired by them. It just kept getting postponed. It was nice, today, to see someone having all of these.🙂 adn so I felt the urge to finally write it down. However, their presenter was only okay kind – not really good. I do not know where do they exist in priority of students though. So can’t say how important it was.

Another PPT I had liked was that of P&G (CMK & CBD). Though it did not comply by these things as such, the presenter was prepared. Despite having a big team on the campus, only one person presented. And although PPT was longish, it wasn’t the kind where the presenter himself/herself is not aware of how long it is going to take. It was well timed and planned. The presenter was good too.

Though from what I have heard, in Finance, it did not turn out all that good because they over-exerted themselves in trying to convince people that Finance is not a “side-function” in P&G.

Very nice topic. One management consultant said “Winners do not do different things. They do things differently” . Another said that you have to check what is “Uniqely you”. Maybe you would like to check out my blog “Make your passion your profession(Students and work prisoners) since it is so specific to the topic.